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50 free Woodpecker trivia questions with answers — nature quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
Woodpeckers hammer wood at forces around 1,000 g and walk away with a headache-free head. This quiz explains how: the spongy skull bone, the tiny brain with almost no fluid around it, the hyoid tongue bone that loops around the braincase like a seatbelt, and the nictitating membrane that snaps shut a millisecond before impact. It also covers the odd feet, the barbed sticky tongue that wraps around grubs rather than spearing them, and why species drum on your gutters. Beyond anatomy it visits the birds themselves: the crow-sized pileated woodpecker and its rectangular holes, the acorn woodpecker's communal granaries, the northern flicker that eats ants off the ground and is Alabama's state bird, the yellow-bellied sapsucker's sap wells, the red-cockaded woodpecker that only nests in living pines, the wryneck that twists its head like a snake, and the ivory-billed and imperial woodpeckers that may or may not still exist. Woody Woodpecker gets a few questions too, including who first supplied his laugh. Every answer was checked against Wikipedia's articles on the woodpecker family and the individual species, and each question shows the sentence that supports it. Try our Birds quiz for the rest of the aviary.
30 of 50 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Woodpeckers belong to which bird family?
Picidae
The family also includes the piculets, wrynecks and sapsuckers; Sittidae are the nuthatches and Ramphastidae the toucans.
Q 02Woodpeckers are found on every inhabited continent except which one?
Australia
They are also missing from New Guinea, New Zealand and Madagascar, so a whole slice of the Southern Hemisphere has no native woodpecker at all.
Q 03Roughly how many woodpecker species are there worldwide?
About 240
They are spread over 35 genera, from thumb-sized piculets to birds the size of a crow.
Q 04Which desert species specialises in living among cacti rather than trees?
The Gila
Gila and gilded flickers carve nest holes in tall saguaros of the Sonoran Desert; the holes later house owls, flycatchers and even bats.
Q 05What is the smallest known woodpecker, at about 7.5 cm long?
The bar-breasted piculet
The piculets are tiny tropical woodpeckers; this one weighs under 9 grams, lighter than two US quarters.
Q 06Which Southeast Asian species is the largest member of the family that is definitely still alive?
The great slaty
This Southeast Asian giant reaches 55 cm; the ivory-billed and imperial woodpeckers were bigger but are generally considered extinct.
Q 07What is the term for the woodpecker foot arrangement of two toes forward and two back?
Zygodactyl
Parrots and cuckoos share the layout; it turns the foot into a clamp for gripping vertical bark.
Q 08How many toes does the black-backed woodpecker have on each foot?
Three
Losing the inner hind toe is thought to let them lean back and deliver a harder blow.
Q 09Besides its feet, what does a woodpecker brace against the trunk to hold itself upright?
Its stiffened tail
The piculets and wrynecks lack the stiff tail feathers, which is one reason they perch across branches like ordinary birds.
Q 10Which woodpecker structure is so long it winds around the outside of the skull, cushioning the brain?
The hyoid (tongue) bone
It splits in two, passes either side of the spine, loops over the braincase and finally ends in the right nostril.
Q 11A 2004 study showed the woodpecker's tongue does what to a grub instead of spearing it?
Wraps around it
The tongue is barbed and sticky, so once it curls around a larva the prey slides out with it.
Q 12Simulations found what share of a woodpecker's pecking energy is stored as strain in the body, not the brain?
99.7%
The skull's spongy bone and the beak's layered structure spread the shock across the whole bird.
Q 13Why do woodpeckers tend to peck in short bursts with brief pauses?
Their skull heats up
The rests give the head time to cool before the next drum roll.
Q 21Woodpeckers can remove up to what share of emerald ash borer larvae from an infested ash tree?
85%
That makes them one of the few natural checks on the beetle that has killed tens of millions of North American ash trees.
Q 22In a Roman legend, a woodpecker brought food to which abandoned children?
Romulus and Remus
The bird was sacred to Mars alongside the she-wolf, and the mythical King Picus was himself turned into a woodpecker.
Q 23Which critically endangered species survives as a few hundred birds on one Japanese island?
The Okinawa woodpecker
Its forest is squeezed by dams, roads, golf courses and helipads.
Q 14What closes over a woodpecker's eye in the millisecond before its beak hits the wood?
A nictitating membrane
The membrane keeps out flying splinters and also stops the retina from tearing under the deceleration.
Q 15Roughly what deceleration does a woodpecker's head endure with each strike?
About 1,000 g
That is many times the force that would concuss a human, delivered up to 20 times a second.
Q 16Woodpecker skulls have inspired the design of protective helmets and which other piece of engineering?
Airplane black boxes
Engineers copied the spongy bone and flexible beak to protect fragile recorders from crash impacts.
Q 17In woodpeckers, drumming on a resonant surface is the equivalent of what in songbirds?
Song
It is mainly a territorial signal, and the number of beats and cadence of the roll are unique to each species.
Q 18What colour are woodpecker eggs?
White
Cavity eggs need no camouflage, and white shells are easier for the parents to see in the dark.
Q 19In most woodpecker species, which parent takes the night shift incubating the eggs?
The male
The male also does most of the digging; the pair shares daytime incubation and chick feeding.
Q 20Which member of the woodpecker family does NOT dig its own nest hole?
Jynx
The wrynecks (genus Jynx) have weak bills and must find ready-made cavities, often old woodpecker holes or nest boxes; Picumnus is the piculets, Sphyrapicus the sapsuckers and Colaptes the flickers.
Q 24The pileated woodpecker is famous for chipping holes of what shape into trees?
Roughly rectangular
The big oblong excavations expose carpenter-ant galleries and are a giveaway that a pileated is around.
Q 25The pileated woodpecker is North America's largest living woodpecker; where does it rank worldwide?
Third
Only two Asian and Eurasian giants are bigger among species known to survive.
Q 26The pileated woodpecker's favourite food is which insect?
Carpenter ants
It also takes wood-boring beetle larvae, and in winter adds fruit and nuts.
Q 27Which ivory-billed woodpecker nickname supposedly came from what people exclaimed on seeing it?
Lord God Bird
Other folk names included Log Cock, Kent (after its toy-trumpet call) and Poule de Bois in Cajun French.
Q 28In what year was the last universally accepted US sighting of an ivory-billed woodpecker?
1944
Audubon artist Don Eckelberry saw it on Louisiana's Singer Tract just as the last of the old-growth forest was being logged.
Q 29A disputed 2004 ivory-billed woodpecker sighting triggered a huge Cornell search in which state?
Arkansas
The blurry Luneau video from the Cache River refuge was accepted by the Fish and Wildlife Service but is still argued over.
Q 30In September 2021 the US Fish and Wildlife Service proposed doing what with the ivory-billed woodpecker?
Declaring it extinct
After public comment the agency paused in 2023 and said it would keep reviewing evidence before a final ruling.